Religions “in the wild” are the varied set of religious activities that occurred before the emergence of organized religions with doctrines, or that persist at the margins of those organized traditions. These religious activities mostly focus on misfortune; on how to remedy specific cases of illness, accidents, failures; and on how to prevent them. I present a general model to account for the cross-cultural recurrence of these particular themes. The model is based on (independently established) features of human psychology—namely, (a) epistemic vigilance, the set of systems whereby we evaluate the quality of information and of sources of information, and (b) threat-detection psychology, the set of evolved systems geared at detecting potential danger in the environment. Given these two sets of systems, the dynamics of communication will favor particular types of messages about misfortune. This makes it possible to predict recurrent features of religious systems, such as the focus on nonphysical agents, the focus on particular cases rather than general aspects of misfortune, and the emergence of specialists. The model could illuminate not just why such representations are culturally successful, but also why people are motivated to formulate them in the first place.

“野外”宗教是在有教义的有组织的宗教出现之前发生的各种宗教活动，或者在这些有组织的传统的边缘持续存在。这些宗教活动多以厄运为主；关于如何补救特定的疾病、事故、失败案例；以及如何预防它们。我提出了一个通用模型来解释这些特定主题的跨文化重现。该模型基于（独立建立的）人类心理学的特征——即，（a）认知警戒，我们评估信息和信息来源质量的系统集，以及（b）威胁检测心理学，集旨在检测环境中潜在危险的进化系统。鉴于这两套系统，交流的动态将有利于特定类型的关于不幸的信息。这使得预测宗教系统的反复出现的特征成为可能，例如关注非物质因素、关注特定案例而不是不幸的一般方面，以及专家的出现。该模型不仅可以阐明为什么这种表述在文化上是成功的，而且还可以阐明为什么人们一开始就有动力去表述它们。